“Hey,” she took it back from me. “You have to be a baller to get one a these bitches.”
I laughed. “What you say?”
She put her hands on her hips defiantly. “You gotta be a baller to get one a these bitches!”
I laughed. “So, so you’re the male basketball player and that the female dog?” I laughed.
She squinted at me. “Huh? Whatever.”
“Calls somebody. Calls somebody to save you like you said.”
“I can’t. It’s a new phone. It’s not in stores yet. I don’t know how to use it.” “You—how did you get it?” I asked.
She threw an arm up, thrusting the phone into the air like an Olympic torch, “Important! I’m important.”
I touched her shoulder. “We’re all important, Naked Girl.”
She shirked away from me and made a noise like a wrong-answer-buzzer: “EHHH! Wrong!” She smiled. “Just me. You don’t exist right now. You don’t exist ever!”
“If you call someone,” I asked. “Who you call?”
Her eyes got big. “Everyone! Every friend and boyfriend that I’ve ever had from every school I’ve ever been to. Even kindergarten. And all the teachers that lovey-loved me—they’d all cover me right now like my warm blankey.”
“Blankey?” I asked.
“A blanket. A blanket! Dipshit! A blanket—”
“Blanket of nice peoples for you to wrap up in?”
She wrapped her arms around herself and spun on her heels, smiling. “They’d keep me so warm.”
“But, none of those peoples would exist. You the only real person, right? They’re like, what? Accessories or gadgets? Universe would arrange itself to your wants like in What the Bleep Do We Know Anyway? or The Secret.”
“Cor-rect,” she said, and spinning, “La-la-lalala-la. La. La.”
I tapped my wrist as if I had a watch. Then I kept doing it some more until she looked. “You know, I’m not responsible for you. All bet’s are off. This is a bad place and a bad time for things.”
“What are you?” she asked. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“You shouldn’t be here alone at this time of night. A vampire in daylight,” I laughed, “that’s what you are. You’re a vampire in daylight.”
She slung her purse back over her shoulder. “La-la-lalalala-la.” She smiled.
“You should probably pull it together a little bit, eh?”
She looked at me. “Who are you? You’re not my father!”
“Ditto, bitch,” I said.
She brushed past me. I thought she was going to leave the bathroom but she got sidetracked and ended up sitting on the bench inside the shower-robe vestibule.
I walked past her on my way out of the bathroom and I said, “I believe you were something—once.”
She didn’t look up. “Fuck-off.”
As I walked through the halls I realized that Wilfred and Rex had stirred most of the sleeping members and pledges out of the rack room. The House was feeling its second wind. Gatherings in the rooms adjacent to K-Zorro’s stewed with angst, conspiracy theory and background 60’s and 70’s rock.
I walked through the door of K-Zorro’s room. The lights were on. I’d never imagined that room could fit that many people. The two couches and loveseat were packed with Rex, Solomon, Budge, Kothenbeutal, Mark, Gerhard, Tag, Michael Kessler, Stanley Jordan and Wilfred. Dubnicek, Budge and Todd Kessler sat in plastic chairs and the TV and computer had been shoved out of the way for people to sit along the desktop. Drake stood, pointing his lit cigarette at people to emphasize his accusations and his needy declarations as he ashed on the floor and drank whiskey sodas from a plastic cup.
The rectilinear arrangement of pharmaceutical pills had been largely picked over. Blue powdery remnants of a crushed Benzedrine lay smeared over a clay grinder with crumpled Dixie cups. The half-empty fruit juice bottles that they had mixed the crushed pills with were toppled and strewn close by.
Marijuana smoke set the room in a fluorescent-lit haze. Their red eyes studied each other, fidgeting, tapping sneakers and flip-flops and fingernails, switching places, shoving, like this anxious band of chimpanzees.
“Victor,” Rex called from over by the far couch, “Take a seat over here. You’re making me nervous, again.”
“There’s not room,” I said. They were crazy in there. It seemed safer to watch from a distance.
“Sure there is!” Rex shoved Mark to yield a fist’s width of space. “See!”
I weaved through shoulders and knees to squish down and widen out that fist width of couch space.
A pledge by the name of Magillus gave up his seat along the desktop and K-Zorro got up off the couch and took it. K-Zorro bent a wire coat hanger as he eyed us. “It’s stupid,” he said, “I don’t know why I joined this fraternity. I mean, we get high. But we never do anything.”
“What should we be doing?” Rex asked.
“Taking back what’s ours,” K-Zorro replied.
“You’re talking about the letterhead,” Rex said.
“You’re not really a President, are you?”
“What’s that mean?”
“More of a mouse-a-dent, right? Mouse-a-dent. Or an Ac-ci-dent.” He bent the hanger in half. “You don’t really lead. You do random shit to satisfy your urges—bah-bah-bah, buh-bah-buh-bah—weeeooww! Like that fucking random-ass Frat-Court you gave Victor for him being with Internet. Then you talk shit to a Headquarters delegate and get the House in trouble. You don’t have a clue what you’re doing.”
I knew I had to say something to that but my lips were super-glued. Something kept ringing my body like a tuning fork. The floor, the ceiling, the walls—all illusions. I was an astronaut. It was brave of me to explore this deep, dark space.
“I know what I’m doing,” Rex said.
“It was all bullshit, Rex,” Drake flicked an ash to the floor as he stab-pointed. “You put Victor on trial for some sexually prudish bullshit. But when Victor punched Dubnicek in the jaw, that shit was cool. Because that’s what men do, right. They fuck each other up. Violence is cool but heaven forbid someone express themselves sexually. You always walk around here like your starting something new but you’re just a shadow of American values. And, AND—you’re favorite color…”—hiccup!—“…baseball bat McDonald’s. I rest my case, bitches.”
“What am I being accused of?” Rex said, “You guys think I should just let things keep going the way they’re going. Sure, Victor and Dubnicek fought. At least they dealt with each other directly, like men—like igloos in the sand! They didn’t just hit a bunch of keys on a keyboard.”
“You’re disgusting.” Drake took a drink. “You disgust… us…”
K-Zorro twisted his hanger. He wasn’t looking at anyone. His jittering head seemed to pick all these spots on the ceiling to talk to. “I’ve been listening to Rex talk for a long time. He tricks. He makes you think he’s got something to say by telling you a little bit. If he told us his whole plan for the House at once—weeeooow!—we’d all laugh. It’d be—weeeooow!—It’d be moronic.”
Rex leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what’s moronic, K-Zorro—”
“Don’t call me that—”
Rex slapped his hand over his thigh. Then he grew startled by the discovery of this hand and drew it closer to his face as he spoke, “What’s moronic is thinking you can sit down and write out a plan for the future instead of living and feeling.”
“You see!” K-Zorro looked to us. “Exactly. A bunch of evasive, new-age bullshit!” He through a couple jab punches into the air with his free hand in response to the bridge of Another Brick in the Wall.
“You want to know what my plan is?!” Rex asked.
“Yes!” K-Zorro, Michael Kessler and Drake said.
“You think we’re really all sitting here!” Rex raised his hand. “You think this is really my hand just because I can move these fingers. Spook this out, me darlings!” He curled his fingers. “You think that, you, K-Zo
rro, don’t have as equal a claim to this hand as I do—!”
“I don’t want any a that hand,” Wilfred said. “I know where it’s been.”
We laughed. Someone started tapping out a staccato beat with this nickel onto a dirty, glass coffee table. I’m not sure if I was crawling toward this nickel but it had these three rust specs describing the vertices of a snooty isosceles triangle—each spec a tragic birthmark from the hand of God. Somehow I fell inside the fluorescent-lit marijuana haze. It was flame hot in there. Everything owned me and there was none of me left to focus on.
“We’re all One, K-Zorro,” Rex continued, scratching his forearm with some bizarre compulsion. “I want us to remember that in spite of all this technology bullshit that keeps invading our lives without the instruction manuals.” He licked where he had scratched and then looked up at us like he didn’t expect to see us. “I want us to become men the way men are supposed to become men. The way they’ve always become men. That’s an awesome responsibility. Do you understand that?”
“Bulll-shhhit!” K-Zorro said like a foghorn. He rode some air-waves with his hands.
“See! You’re already lost K-Zorro. You’ve already become a zombie or a machine of technology if you think that.”
“If you some anti-tech guy,” I said, “why did you make us do that P2P thing?”
He looked to me, disgusted. “You think it’s simple, Victor. You think we can run away from the world. Run away from its energy and momentum? We have to embrace what’s happening in order to deal with it.
“I love you guys. Because I know you’re all just extensions of me. We’re all just different facets of each other.”
Kothenbeutal pressed index fingers into his temples like he could read our minds. “When you’re mad at us,” he said, “you tell us we don’t exist.”
“That’s because you don’t exist then,” Rex said. “You all go inside the dark box then.” He scratched his hair and flicked his fingers through the air like a misdirecting magician. “Look, I want us to escape. I want us to escape reductionism. I want us to escape the sadness of becoming the machines we use. I want us to use those machines to become more human than any generation ever has before. I want us to use those machines to let us all become One.”
“Impossible,” Drake said, dragging from his cigarette and scratching his neck. That fool had gotten a contact high from the marijuana haze. “The odds against that happening are—blee, blew, blee, blew, beep—and that was in the state of Nevada.”
Stanley Jordan stood from his position on his couch, “I fucked my second girlie this week and I’ve never been better. It’s like I steal their moles—souls—SOULS! I mean. Yah, that’s what I take from’em. I’m hungry for more. Listen to my song—NO! Belay that order.” He swiped his hand at us, dismissively before turning to walk away. “I’m through with this. I’m changing my car insurance.”
“Stanley Jordan, get back here!” Rex called.
Stanley Jordan turned and asked, “Geico? Who’s in?! Who’s in?!”
“He’s on to something,” I mumbled. “I feel grumpy,” I said.
“I feel like feeling something,” K-Zorro said.
“Yah,” Wilfred said. “Exactly! Do you ever do something because you’re greedy to just have some feelings? Like when you’re bored. Like you’re just sitting there trying to study and you say, damn I’m bored. I want to feel something. So you drink some caffeine or listen to music or jerk-off just to, just to get yourself from one feeling to the next.”
“Yah,” Mark said. “I do that shit, man. It works. It gets you through another sasquatch factory.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” Rex asked. “That’s what life is now: feelings. That’s how we live now: feelings. We have to embrace it and live.”
“I know what you guys are talking about,” Drake said. “But it’s pathetic to see you all so addicted to your feelings.”
“What more is there to life than feelings?” Rex asked. “Every action we take is in the pursuit of feelings. You’re a coward, Drake, if you’re afraid to feel. Because that means you’re afraid to live. You’re afraid to eat your rice and live! Listen to them sing!”
“You’re like little kittens lapping the milk,” Drake said.
“Liar!” Rex said.
Something inside me rung me like a tuning fork, again. I shivered and I felt distant from them.
“What I want to know is? Why did I even join this fraternity?” K-Zorro asked. “We never do anything.”
“You want to know why you joined, K-Zorro?” Rex said.
“Yes. Really that’s all I want to know from you people.”
“Zombie,” Rex said.
“What?” K-Zorro asked.
“You want to know why you joined. Because I’ll show you. But I don’t want to show you if you’re too afraid to really see why you joined.”
Wilfred leaned over toward Rex, “Rex, maybe we shouldn’t show him just yet—”
Something was happening in the room. We could all feel it. Anger spread and hit us in waves. Their faces changed. The skin of their faces grew bluer and more translucent. They were fish-monster sent to me from before time immemorial. They were rediscovered three-year-old nightmares—
“No,” Rex said. “I’ll show him. It’s what I’m going to do.”
“Yes,” K-Zorro said. “Show me.”
Rex dug into the pocket of his sweatpant cutoffs. “Here,” he said, “these are the House keys.” He looked around. “We’re going into Ma Red’s suite to get our letterhead back.”
“Hey!” Budge said. He seemed to glance at the keys in Rex’s hand before arching his head to the ceiling. “Aren’t those supposed to be locked in my lockbox in my room? I thought they were…: Thieves: Robin Hood: Little John: Toilet Paper.” He laughed, shook his head ‘no’ and closed his eyes.
We formed into a mob—down the stairwell, hollering—rushing across the main hallway tiles and through the door leading to Ma Red’s suite. It seemed to me like the size of things like the width and length of the hallway and the distance between me and the next guy were this lie that I had found a way to move past. It was nice to know that death was an illusion too: Someone had taken all the rocks out of my shoe.
Rex worked his way through the mob, jingling the house keys high over his head.
Some of the UNL Alphas who had been sleeping in their sleeping bags in the Blue Room roused and sent their leader over to reason with Rex. They sent over this anti-Rex with a similar build and jaw but with dark hair and dark skin. They seemed so big as they argued: Dueling Godzillas. Wowza!
“You should think about this,” Anti-Rex told Rex.
“It’s happening,” Rex said, trying another key and then yanking this mismatched key from the lock. “Watch it happen, you UNL Alpha!”
“Are you high on something, man,” Anti-Rex said. Anti-Rex—King of Status Quo.
“I’m higher than your life,” Rex answered. “It’s Paradisio!”
“PARADISIO!” we exclaimed from behind him. I could feel our power. It grew denser in our close, breath-filled air.
“Maybe we should pound on her door,” I suggested, touching my eyebrows. “Let her spirit know we’re coming in!”
“That’s clever!” someone said, though not necessarily to me. There were a lot of remarks up for grabs.
“I don’t think you should be doing this,” Anti-Rex declared—King of Manners, King of Sober Wisdom. I loved that guy enough to punch out every one of his teeth.
“I don’t think you should have a face!” Rex retorted and we agreed with Rex—emphatically! He fumbled through keys. “Someone’s trying to stop me with these keys. The key isn’t on this ring. Who’s playing games?” He dropped the key ring. “We’ll use our shoulders!” Rex slammed his shoulder into the door. “Shoulders!”
“I don’t want any part of this,” the Anti-Rex said and walked back toward the crescent of UNL onlookers in the foyer.
“Wait,” Drake
said. “If we destroy her door—”
“There’s a spare door in the Pit-Pit,” K-Zorro said. He stomped his foot: “Fix ‘er in the morning ‘fore she get back.”
“There you have it,” Rex said, slamming his shoulder into the door as our hands pawed higher up on her wood. “It’s been said. Nobody can deny it!” He slammed his shoulder. “This isn’t enough! This shoulder will never be enough.”
“There’s a bust of Howard Tafield Scobey in the Blue Room!” anyone said.
“The bust!” we cheered. “Get it! The bust! The bust! Get it! Get it, get it, get it, get it, get it.”
We grabbed the bust out of the Blue Room. It was a heavy bust. I felt one of its sharp metal corners! They slammed it against her door. It made a crack and a rumble like we owned thunder. Our thunder. “Feel it!” Wilfred yelled. “Feel it, feel it, yah!”
“YEEEEEEE-HAAAAAW!” Gerhard screamed, clenching his fists and drawing out the red cords in his neck. He did a dance that was more Techno than Country.
Drake steadied the back of the bust’s torso as K-Zorro and Rex battering-rammed that son-of-a-bitch into her splintering door. “I’m doing this,” Drake yelled, tensing every muscle in his body. “It’s mine! It’s me that’s doing this.”
“This is a little weird,” someone said.
“Shut up!”
“GEICO CAR INSURANCE!” Stanley Jordan screamed. He wasn’t messing around. He shoved that bust from behind.
The UNL Alphas yelled and laughed at us. “You dudes seriously need girlfriends!”
The yellow wood splintered and splintered until a fissure appeared, widening the entrance to the dark room, two inches—crack!—four inches—crack!—twelve inches—crack!—twenty four! That sucker was TEARING open!
“Hold it!” Rex yelled and we dropped the bronze bust, sending Howard Tafeild Scobey’s decapitated head spinning over impacted tiles.
Rex punched his way through the splintered wood. He kicked a big chunk into her dark room, reached in and unlocked what remained of the door, swinging open the flimsy, splintery mess.
“Rex,” I said. I steadied myself on the drywall. “You hand’s a-bleed’n!”
Growing Up Wired Page 15